The Ishumar Guitar: Emergence, Circulation and Evolution, from the Diasporic Performances to the World Scene Nadia Belalimat
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The Ishumar Guitar: Emergence, Circulation and Evolution, from the Diasporic Performances to the World Scene Nadia Belalimat To cite this version: Nadia Belalimat. The Ishumar Guitar: Emergence, Circulation and Evolution, from the Diasporic Performances to the World Scene. Anja Fischer & Ines Kohl Tuareg Society within a Globalized World, Saharan Life in Transition, I.B.Tauris, pp.155-170, 2010, 9781848853706. halshs-01395559 HAL Id: halshs-01395559 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01395559 Submitted on 16 Nov 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Nadia Belalimat : The Ishumar Guitar: Emergence, Circulation & Evolution from Diasporic Performances to the World Scene.* in Tuareg Society within a globalized World ( Fischer and Kohl eds.), Tauris, 2010 : 155-170. In 2004, with the album Amassakoul (Traveller), the Tinariwen band showed the world a contemporary image of Kel Tamasheq society. Its success sanctioned worldwide the cult music of the Tuareg rebellion of 1990, and propelled its cultural and political message into ‘world sound’, while the band joined the professional circuit of world music. While this success significantly widened its public, it also helped publicize the most critical aspects of contemporary Sahara. In recent years, many ishumar guitar bands joined the international scene, so that one can hear the words of the Kel Tamasheq about their own modernity. The style, poetry and recent developments in this music express the historical fractures and socio- economic upheavals that accompanied the advent of post-colonial states. The various migratory processes in which ishumar have been engaged shape the geography, music and politics of the Kel Tamasheq region of central Sahara. Independence deeply affected the Kel Tamasheq economic and political life in northern Mali and northern Niger, the places furthest from the new centralized political powers. In their vast territory, which now spans five states – Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Libya – the Kel Tamasheq have been turned into outlying minorities coming under different policies and different jurisdictions of their respective states. In Algeria and Libya, assimilation policies are in force in an attempt to integrate them into the national citizenry, while in Mali and Niger they are excluded from many post-decolonization policies and various national logics depending on the region concerned. Overlaying this territorial aspect of the states is a complex diasporic process, and Ishumar music bears testimony to these people’s migrations and their evolution on an intra-Saharan scale. The music takes on an original transnational cultural value when viewed in its current cross-border setup. * Many thanks to Anne Saint-Girons for her translation from French. 1 In this chapter I shall show how the music reflects current Kel Tamasheq mobility and life experiences, and how its emergence during the region’s post-colonial phase relates directly to complex and many-sided migration patterns. The music arose out of very special conditions that were present in the Kel Adaŕ diasporic community in the 1970s and 1980s, namely a combination of social marginalization leading to the formation of various migratory social movements and a revitalization of poetic and musical forms. We shall see how it can be understood as a new formulation of various traditional musical and poetic genres set against specific social criticism and Kel Tamasheq political speeches. I emphasize how the music relates to the territory, both in the lyrics of the songs and in the local modes of distribution. I shall not deal with ishumar music as world music. In fact, I shall consider it as a social and artistic display that proceeds from an uninterrupted and multidimensional process. Its recent Western dimension becomes significant when comparing the multiple social meanings it embodies in diasporic communities, both in current national contexts and on the world scene. The Kel Tamasheq pop guitar is rising in popularity and various media are involved in its circulation, diffusion and commercialization. Yet the cyber network penetrating the Sahara and Sahel tends to make them telescope. I shall recall how the marginalization and pauperization of the Kel Adaŕ in northern Mali in the 1970s revitalized and transformed cultural and musical expression. Invented during a socially destabilizing diasporic experience, the Kel Tamasheq guitar, however, emerged at at the junction of closely related musical traditions of West Africa, in the Niger bend, which were redefined when the guitar was introduced into the region. In some respects, and despite its original features, this music is part of the West African modern guitar penetration into Mali at the end of the 1960s. The ishumar guitar can be seen as a hybrid that reshapes several musical styles or types, while producing a social critique and political discourse from the history of the Kel Tamasheq nationalist movement. I shall then look at the evolution and assimilation of this musical type into Mali and Niger. Last, I shall focus on some aspects of its worldwide distribution, namely its cyberspace music circulation, showing with a few examples how it illustrates and reproduces the different imaginary resources that emerge and circulate both in the world music of the Western world and in the transnational culture of the ishumar. 2 THE EMERGENCE OF THE ISHUMAR GUITAR IN POST-INDEPENDENCE KEL TAMASHEQ DIASPORIC PROCESSES This music emerged in the mid-1970s from socially and politically marginalized Kel Adaŕ communities in central Sahara. The 1963 Kel Adaŕ revolt opposed Malian state sovereignty. It was brutally repressed and the army slaughtered hundreds of people and their livestock. Military rule was imposed on this region until the end of the 1980s.1 Many Kel Adaŕ groups fled to the Ahaggar in Algeria with numerous orphans. Family dispersal and social marginalization are some of the consequences of this diasporic movement. For the Kel Adaŕ, this historical fracture with the past during the postindependence period was at the start of their cultural and identity reconstructions. It forced on them a new form of mobility that until then had been unknown within their very ancient tradition of mobility. This was the time of the exodus, on foot, towards southern Algeria. In small groups, these nomads, fleeing the army after losing their livestock in the droughts of 1968–74, would walk to Tamanrasset with only a five-litre can of water to help them brave the 700-kilometre journey to the wilaya. This was what the first ishumar referred to at the time as the ‘can road’. Successive waves of young men would leave home to start a new and adventurous way of life. They faced hostile authorities and state borders that deprived them of any citizenship. Consequently, they would cross the borders illegally or, as they say in French, ‘en fraude’ (locally rendered into afrod). The word afrod has now come to refer to their various cross-border smuggling activities. They started smuggling on foot, operating a kind of subsistence economy during the droughts of the 1980s, under dangerous conditions.2 At the time, the word ashamur referred to various exclusionary forms of citizenry and education, which all Kel Tamasheq shared, in Mali as well as in Niger, as mentioned in the following verse: Wur leŕ elkad faw iktaben, kunta weddeŕ I ishraden: ‘[On the road to exile] We have no [identity] papers, no education [literally books] other than our amulets.’ A mix of economic and political factors in the context of a difficult and protracted post-colonial transition, which affected migration patterns in general, sparked off this particular diasporic movement of southern Kel Tamasheq people living on the peripheries of the newly independent states. During the 1970s and 1980s, when severe droughts exacerbated already difficult political and economic conditions, new migration waves originated from the Azawaŕ valley and Tamesna (in Niger and Mali respectively), from Aïr (in Niger) and from Adaŕ (in Mali). At one time or another political exile, seasonal labour migration and droughts affected most Kel Tamasheq people. 3 When two extreme droughts (the first from 1968 to 1974 and the second from 1984 to 1986) shattered the pastoral economy, most nomad families took refuge in urban centres. Shantytowns sprang up and became de facto ghettos for destitute refugees around Arlit, Niamey, Gao, Agadez and Tamanrasset, and on the borders between Algeria, Mali and Niger. Young men, mostly Kel Adaŕ from Mali, or Kel Aïr and Kel Azawad from Niger, migrated to the main cities (Tamanrasset, Ghat, Sebha and Ubari) of the Kel Tamasheq regions in southern Algeria and southern Libya where they formed informal diasporic communities and from which the Kel Tamasheq political movement emerged in the late 1970s.3 The ishumar worked as seasonal labourers in Fezzan towns. Some migrants took on Libyan nationality and were integrated into the local economy, while many others were relegated, without rights to own land or to open a shop, bank or business, to the informal Libyan economy, which the official public economic system dominated. Even though Kel Tamasheq were, in theory, welcome in Libya, many did not want to adopt Libyan nationality, or could not because they were unable to prove their previous national origin, so their personal status remains uncertain.4 It kept them on the margins of the social system in Libya, though they did have access to medical and educational services. Sebha is Libya’s entrance point for migrants from the southern Sahara.